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  • Introduction: Picturing The World's First Bubble Economy

Picturing the World's First Bubble Economy

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    Selling the New World

    map

    Empire of the Imagination

    designed to appear as scattered papers on a desk are depictions of traders crowding streets and coffee houses. There is also a playing card, a poem entitled: Bubble Poem and a copy of the London Gazette

    John Law, Rakish Financier

    John Law standing in a french garden in a large wig and the style of long three piece suit popular at the time

    Lady Credit, Fickle Goddess

    A chaotic scene with many people tearing at a well dressed man in the center. There is a nun with a rosary kneeled over him. Behind him there is a well-dressed woman holding paper notes and a blind pauper boy

    Staging Folly

    a central scene of judgement by the devil is surrounded with draperies and flanked by smaller images of exploration

    Commerce Goes to Hell

    a group of grotesquely interpreted wealthy people is rowed by a strange demon with a vase on his head and birds flying around him

    Afterlives

    a grotesque man with a round belly full of gold coins squats over a rotunda while excreting paper money from both orifices

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